The best deals from Alibaba’s Singles Day

Alibaba’s Singles Day is a huge international shopping event that originated in China and has now spread across the globe. Deals kicked off on November 6th, and shoppers everywhere from the US and UK to China and Indonesia are able to nab some good deals.
Many analysts, including App Annie and Adobe, predict that Singles Day will sell more than Black Friday and Cyber Monday combined, based off of last year’s numbers. App Annie put the figure at over $32 billion, while Adobe is estimating $23.4 billion in sales.
Still, the holiday isn’t widely known here in the US. And for newcomers, it might not be clear how to get started grabbing deals. Here’s a quick tutorial on what you’ll need to know.
The holiday, which is believed to have been started in the 1990s as a way for men in colleges to celebrate being single, was turned into a shopping event in 2009 by Alibaba’s Jack Ma and has since become an annual tradition. Other retailers, including JD.com, Suning, and smaller brands, have started to participate in the holiday by offering sales and promotions, too.
Alibaba has multiple platforms that it offers sales on: Taobao, Tmall, and AliExpress. The latter is aimed more at international customers and is the only one of the three available in English. Tmall and Taobao are quite similar, except Tmall’s deals are offered by companies to customers, while Taobao contains deals sold by individuals, which is more like eBay.
Some of the highlights we anticipate on AliExpress and Tmall include deals on Huawei and Xiaomi devices. There are also plenty of third-party fandom apparel, accessories, and household items on sale. We’re updating this article constantly with the latest Singles Day deals.

Internet freedom continues to decline around the world, a new report says

Digital authoritarianism is on the rise, according to a new report from a group that monitors internet freedoms. Freedom House, a pro-democracy think tank, said today that governments are seeking more control over users’ data while also using laws nominally intended to address “fake news” to suppress dissent. It marked the eighth consecutive year that Freedom House found a decline in online freedoms around the world.
“The clear emergent theme in this report is the growing recognition that the internet, once seen as a liberating technology, is increasingly being used to disrupt democracies as opposed to destabilizing dictatorships,” said Mike Abramowitz, president of Freedom House, in a call with reporters. “Propaganda and disinformation are increasingly poisoning the digital sphere, and authoritarians and populists are using the fight against fake news as a pretext to jail prominent journalists and social media critics, often through laws that criminalize the spread of false information.”
In the United States, internet freedom declined in 2018 due to the Federal Communications Commission’s repeal of net neutrality rules. Other countries fared much worse — 17 out of 65 surveyed had adopted laws restricting online media. Of those, 13 prosecuted citizens for allegedly spreading false information. And more countries are accepting training and technology from China, which Freedom House describes as an effort to export a system of censorship and surveillance around the world.
Of course, there are tradeoffs between freedom and security. The report is critical of Sri Lanka and India, which have periodically shut down or limited access to the internet in response to the outbreak of ethnic and religious conflict. In both cases, citizens were being murdered by mobs that had encountered misinformation spread through social media.

Google wants to improve your smart home with iRobot’s room maps

Google and iRobot have announced they’re working together to improve smart home technology using mapping data collected by iRobot’s robot vacuums. The two companies say the aim is to make smart homes “more thoughtful” by leveraging the unique dataset collected by iRobot: maps of customers’ homes.
iRobot’s latest Roomba, the i7+, creates maps using a combination of odometry data (measuring how far the robovac’s wheels move) and low-res camera imagery. The resulting maps can be used to create custom cleaning schedules or to let users ask their Roomba to vacuum specific rooms. An integration with Google Assistant lets customers give verbal commands like, “OK Google, tell Roomba to clean the kitchen.”
Google and iRobot say this data will be useful for other smart home devices. The maps could be used to locate products like Wi-Fi-connected lighting, for example, automatically assigning names and locations to lights in customers’ bedroom, kitchen, and so on.
iRobot CEO Colin Angle told The Verge that the collaboration lays the foundations for future smart homes. “This idea is that when you say, ‘OK Google, turn the lights on in the kitchen,’ you need to know what lights are in the kitchen. And if I say, ‘OK future iRobot robot with an arm, go get me a beer,’ it needs to know where the kitchen and the refrigerator are.”
Google’s Michelle Turner, director of the company’s smart home ecosystem, says the dream is not just to create a smart home, but a “thoughtful home” that requires less input from users and adapts to their wants and needs. “We think a thoughtful home has context,” says Turner, “and that is something that iRobot has done an exceptional job on.”

Google is hosting a global contest to develop AI that’s beneficial for humanity

Some of the biggest hurdles in the field of artificial intelligence are preventing such software from developing the same intrinsic faults and biases as its human creators, and using AI to solve social issues instead of simply automating tasks. Now, Google, one of the world’s leading organizations developing AI software today, is launching a global competition to help spur the development of applications and research that have positive impacts on the field and society at large.
The competition, called the AI Impact Challenge, was announced today at an event called AI for Social Good held at the company’s Sunnyvale, California office, and it’s being overseen and managed by the company’s Google.org charitable arm. Google is positioning it as a way to integrate nonprofits, universities, and other organizations not within the corporate and profit-driven world of Silicon Valley into the future-looking development of AI research and applications. The company says it will award up to $25 million to a number of grantees to “help transform the best ideas into action.” As part of the contest, Google will offer cloud resources for the projects, and it is opening applications starting today. Accepted grantees will be announced at next year’s Google I/O developer conference.
Top of mind for Google with this initiative is using AI to solve problems in areas like environmental science, health care, and wildlife conservation. Google says AI is already used to help pin down the location of whales by tracking and identifying whale sounds, which can then be used to help protect from environmental and wildlife threats. The company says AI can also be used to predict floods and also to identify areas of forest that are especially susceptible to wildfires.
Another big area for Google is eliminating biases in AI software that could replicate the blind spots and prejudices of human beings. One notable and recent example was Google admitting in January that it couldn't find a solution to fix its photo-tagging algorithm from identifying black people in photos as gorillas, initially a product of a largely white and Asian workforce not able to foresee how its image recognition software could make such fundamental mistakes. (Google’s workforce is only 2.5 percent black.) Instead of figure out a solution, Google simply removed the ability to search for certain primates on Google Photos. It’s those kinds of problems — the ones Google says it has trouble foreseeing and needs help solving — that the company hopes its contest can try and address.

Facebook removes Iran-linked accounts followed by more than 1 million people

Facebook has identified more suspicious behavior on its platform linked to an ongoing Iranian influence campaign, the company announced today. In total, Facebook’s security team removed a combined 82 pages, groups, and accounts that were masquerading as US and sometimes UK citizens and organizations. Facebook prohibits “coordinated inauthentic behavior” on the platform, and due to this behavior’s proximity to the US midterm elections, the company says it promptly banned all instances of the network it discovered.
The existence of an Iranian influence campaign designed to sow division and amplify tensions in the US was first revealed back in August, and Google has similarly found evidence of the operation spreading to YouTube. “Despite attempts to hide their true identities, a manual review of these accounts linked their activity to Iran. We also identified some overlap with the Iranian accounts and Pages we removed in August,” writes Nathaniel Gleicher, the company’s head of cybersecurity policy. “However, it’s still early days and while we have found no ties to the Iranian government, we can’t say for sure who is responsible.”
Facebook says it removed 30 pages, 33 Facebook accounts, and three groups on Facebook, and it found 16 new accounts on Instagram. The accounts and pages spent less than $100 on advertising, and they only hosted or co-hosted a total of seven events. However, about 1 million people followed at least one of the pages, while roughly 25,000 people joined at least one of the groups. On Instagram, around 28,000 people followed at least one of the Iran-linked accounts. The earliest account was created in June of 2016, but they were most active over the last year, Gleicher told reporters on a press call this morning.
As seen in the past with the extensive Russian operation to influence the 2016 US election, these efforts are mostly designed to stoke tensions around high-priority issues in the country, like immigration and race relations. Facebook provided a number of examples of the posts these pages and accounts posted, and many either profess anti-Trump sentiment or comment on recent controversies like the nomination hearing of Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh. It’s unclear if there was an equal number of pro-Trump and anti-Trump posts, though the larger point is that these operations seem designed simply to inflame current disagreements rather than spread propaganda unilaterally across the political aisle.

Fourth-generation pokémon are coming to Pokémon Go this week

Pokémon Go players will be able to considerably expand their pokédexes this week, as Niantic has confirmed the arrival of the fourth generation of pokémon. This generation first appeared in the Nintendo DS games Pokémon Diamond, Pearl, and Platinum, and hail from the Hokkaido-influenced Sinnoh region.
As with the third generation, Niantic will be rolling out the new pokémon in waves rather than all at once. The company says it’ll also be announcing new features and expansion to pokémon storage soon. Meanwhile, a handful of generation 3 pokémon — and even one from generation 2 — are yet to be added to the game, mostly because of unique characteristics that Niantic has to figure out how to integrate.
While the world-dominating hype from its launch has predictably subsided, Pokémon Go remains a phenomenally successful mobile game by any other metric, and continues to add features to attract new players and extract more money from the existing base. Recently the game finally enabled trading, while just this week the Android version got support for more advanced AR through Google’s ARCore SDK. Next month Pokémon: Let’s Go will be released for the Nintendo Switch, featuring heavy integration with Pokémon Go.

A military expert explains why social media is the new battlefield

After the 2016 US presidential election, social media came under scrutiny like never before, and what’s since come to light hasn’t been pretty: widespread consensus that foreign government-backed groups used platforms like YouTube, Twitter, and Facebook to spread discord and division among the American public. In their new book, P. W. Singer and Emerson T. Brooking make the argument that what we witnessed was a new form of global conflict, in which there are no bystanders.
LikeWar: The Weaponization of Social Media is a look at the role social media plays in modern conflict. Singer has written extensively about the future of warfare, looking at robotics (Wired for War), cybersecurity (Cybersecurity and Cyberwar: What You Need to Know), private military companies (Corporate Warriors: The Rise of the Privatized Military Industry), and even speculative fiction (Ghost Fleet: A Novel of the Next World War). Now, he turns his attention to what warfare looks like when information can spread around the world instantly. Singer and Brooking look at how groups like ISIS have used platforms like YouTube and Twitter to spread their message around the world, taunting their opponents and enticing new recruits, while bad actors like Russian-backed groups found ways to game Facebook’s design to spread misinformation and lies.
The telegraph and then the telephone allowed us to connect personally from a distance at a speed not previously possible. Radio and then TV allowed one to broadcast out to many. What social media has done is combine the two, allowing simultaneous personal connection as never before, but also the ability to reach out to the entire world. The challenge is that this connection has been both liberating and disruptive. It has freed communication, but it has also been co-opted to aid the vile parts of it as well. The speed and scale have allowed these vile parts to escape many of the firebreaks that society had built up to protect itself. Indeed, I often think about a quote in the book from a retired US Army officer, who described how every village once had an idiot. And now, the internet has brought them all together and made them more powerful than ever before.